Nita Jalkanen says she checks on the avian neighbours that fly into her Edmonton backyard to drink from her bird bath nearly every day with her dog Ariel.
“I talk to them. I say, ‘Good morning or good afternoon, Mr. Magpie’ and they feel safe so there’s no squawking,” said the 59-year-old in an interview.
“They’ll come and approach (Ariel) and play. They’ll chase each other around the tree … like they are playing tag.
“They’ve obviously formed a friendship with my dog and with me.”
She said despite many locals being divided on their opinions of magpies, Jalkanen said the ones that visit her from their nest sitting on a tree down the boulevard brighten up her days.
“They make me happy because they’re so happy,” she said.
Black-billed magpies can be seen walking, soaring and chirping in nearly every neighbourhood in Edmonton.
The bird is seen in murals around town and locals sometimes wear magpie costumes for Halloween.
Elly Knight, an avian ecologist with the Alberta Biodiversity Monitoring Institute, says that’s why it makes sense the city declared the conspicuous, clever and chatty corvidae with striking black, blue, green and white stripes its official bird this May.
“Everyone’s neighbour is a magpie in Edmonton,” said Knight, also a professor of biological science at the University of Alberta.
Nature Alberta says more than 40,000 people cast their vote to choose the city’s official bird.
“(Magpies) won 16,018 votes in total, meaning nearly 40 per cent of Edmonton-area residents who voted chose this bird to represent their city,” it said in a post on social media.
Knight said magpies aren’t her first choice of bird species to represent the city.
“I find magpies a little bit brash relative to the average Edmontonian,” she said.
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“They’re so noisy. They are also, as corvids, sometimes a little bit mean.”
Knight said they are often embroiled in turf wars with their sister species, the crow. “They will attack each other’s nests and attack each other’s babies. They will also eat baby squirrels. And it’s that element that I know of Edmonton is not as representative.”
Knight said their loud chirping also what makes them stand out, sometimes becoming a nuisance to locals. The high-pitched tweets are often of teen magpies looking for attention.
“They’ve got their full feathers but they’re still kind of idiots. And so they are following their parents around basically going, ‘Mom, mom, mom,’ asking for food. They’re learning how to be magpies in the world,” Knight said.
Their low-pitched chirp is often magpies warning their relatives of a nearby predator.
“Magpies really don’t like outdoor cats because they’re a threat. Other than that, they don’t have a lot of natural predators in the city. And so they’re not really afraid of anything.”
Their population has also grown in urban areas in recent decades as humans also migrate to Edmonton, Knight said.
“Part of why they’re so strongly associated with urban and suburban areas is they’re eating garbage,” she said, adding they also eat worms and berries.
But their recognition does also make sense because magpies are more Albertan than people might think, she said.
“It’s a bird Edmonton strongly identifies with,” she said.
“They’re plucky, they’re tenacious, they’re smart. They’re resilient. They’re very family oriented. They stand up for each other,” she said.
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She said they are monogamous creatures with a low divorce rate and elder offspring often take care of their newborn siblings.
Although most magpies only live a couple of years and can produce up to nine babies, Knight added that magpies can live for 20 years in captivity.
Unlike other birds, she said, magpies also tend to live in the same nest for years at a time.
“The male and the female will come back to the same location every year, which is unusual in birds to reuse nests.” They also renovate their homes, bringing in new sticks and twigs to maintain them. Some magpie nests have been found with domes above them.
Magpies are also not scared of the winter seasons, Knight said, similar to the Albertans who live in the province’s north.
“We don’t have a lot of bird species that stick it out here year-round and I think people identify with that resilience.”
It’s tough to say whether Edmonton is “magpie capital” as some have called the city, Knight said. There are other places in Western Canada and in western American states with large magpie populations.
Jalkanen said magpies were the first things she noticed when she moved to Alberta nearly four decades ago.
“When I saw my first magpie here in Edmonton, I said, ‘Oh, what a beautiful bird.’ And the person I was with said, ‘We don’t like those.’ I still disagree with that. They’re a beautiful bird, and they’re given a really hard time for no real reason,” she said.
“It just makes sense to treat them nicely and respectfully. And they will do the same to you.”
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